NYFF 2009: Bluebeard

Composing her images like a painter, Catherine Breillat infuses a fairy tale with her notorious interest in sexual politics

Catherine Breillat / France / 2009 / 78m

A tame entry by Catherine Breillat, known for subversive depictions of sexuality, Bluebeard is still filled with more ideas of gender and sexual curiosity than most films today. Images measured to the inch, it still cannot escape the fact that it looks like a BBC rip-off.

Adapting the Charles Perrault’s tale Bluebeard has been done before, many times, as early as 1901 when George Méliès made it into a short. The story hasn’t changed. Marie-Catherine and her sister Anne have recently lost their father, and their family is poor. She turns to wealthy Lord Bluebeard, who she sees as kind and soft while everyone sees him as an ogre and monstrous. They get married. Marie-Catherine asks to sleep in a different room from him, smaller to fit her size. She has power over him with the fact that she is a virgin and she’s not ready to give it up just yet.

Breillat frames her story with two sisters reading the story in an attic in the 20^th century, the 1950s to be specific. The younger, more provocative sister seems to be a stand in for Breillat herself, while the older, more fragile sister seems to be stand in for Breillat’s actual sister. These two girls keep the film entertaining, as the younger sister reads the story and they both add their own commentary along the way.

Bluebeard shifts between the magically enchanted and the socially-aware, sometimes merging the two. In this sense, Breillat is successful, but the film just isn’t that powerful. There is a scene in the middle, after Marie-Catherine and Bluebeard get married, where he is getting undressed and she is seen spying on him. She watches, with the expectation of seeing some kind of beast, only to find out that Bluebeard is just a hunk of human flesh, vulnerable and yielding like any other man. If Breillat continues on this fairy tale path, she better get new costume and set designers. As it is, Bluebeard is a minor inoffensive film in a European provocateur’s filmography.